Is the above posted on an Admin forum, or is this a meta-comment on restricted site content?
FWIW, I believe I lost the ability to see member avatars in December 2025; the last date I can definitively say custom avatars were visible for me is when a user referred to @Bev D as a "lad" and I made a wisecrack in response that user pointing to her response in which she mentioned her Avatar picture.
IIRC, that period of time was one where a noticeable increase in bot activity was happening in a variety of internet corners... content scraping most likely... as a handful of other online forums were stepping up their "cloudflare defenses". If I had to speculate, the service/location that hosts the custom images isn't accessible by whatever automated process makes them available for web viewing.
At the time... I simply shrugged off the loss of the avatars as a side effect of something I'd done with my own machines' browser settings and plug-ins. I have one machine that Google absolutely hates... I get the classic "suspicious activity" endless loop of captcha if I accidentally use the search engine, and Youtube has lost almost all functionality for that machine... but other machines with similar (but slightly different defense settings and configurations) don't have those problems... but still don't see forum avatars here.
